Two computer enginneers examine a malfunctioning computer. And one of them says, believing he identified the problem, "its the hard DISC", saying the word "disc" a little louder. This is what I understand when I read "stress of a word/syllable".

As a computer engineer myself, I would never say hard DISK; I would always say HARD disk.

There is a phenomenon in English, whose technical term I cannot remember now, in which noun phrases that become lexicalized in the language have the stress shifted to the front. There is an example I heard from an old sitcom, I think it was Seinfeld, in which the characters are all saying "Chinese FOOD." The phrase hadn't quite solidified as a lexical item. Now that it has, everyone says "CHINESE food."

Well, it's like that with hard disk. When the concept was new, people might have said hard DISK, but now no native English-speaking engineer would every say that; the phrase is HARD disk.

I can't tell you what they're saying over in Greece, of course, but this is the case as I know it here in New York.

English accomplishes a lot with stress that its speakers don't even realize is happening. Another pattern is that multisyllabic noun-verb pairs like record or increase: when they're nouns the stress is on the first syllable (REcord; INcrease); when they're verbs the stress is on the second syllable (reCORD; inCREASE).

Klingon does not seem to have these features, so far as we can tell.

However, in the previous example, if one of the engineers wonders whether its the hard disc which causes the malfunction, he can say "the hard disc ?". And because he is asking, his voice will pronounce the word "disc", with a "rising tone".

Tone is the right word, and is a different phenomenon than stress. We haven't been told anything about tones in Klingon, but actors have generally used English-sounding tones. They are not universal across languages, however.

However, I notice that on numerous occasions of videos I see on youtube, the voice of the speaker does indeed assume a "rising tone". Something which seems to happen not only with the {-be'}, but with other suffixes as well, which happen to bear the qaghwI' and be the last syllable of a word.

Usually what I hear isn't a rising tone in the manner of a question, but it is a higher tone nonetheless. If you listen to all of Okrand's recorded voice, you'll usually hear him do it too. Once in a while you'll hear something else, but stressed syllables usually receive a higher tone.

Whether this is a feature of the language, a mistake, or irrelevant to native speakers is unknown. The Klingon Dictionary leaves the matter of stress vague, and doesn't mention tone at all.

I can't believe that all those people are doing it wrong

I can totally believe that random videos on the Internet get Klingon pronunciation consistently wrong. There is a lot of REALLY bad Klingon out there.

Some common pronunciation errors committed by students who haven't had much speaking practice:

• Pronouncing j as zh
• Pronouncing H as h
• Pronouncing Q or q as k
• Being unable to pronounce gh or tlh at all
  
• Trying to pronounce the vowels too far back in the mouth, to the point of practically choking on them
  
• Ignoring qaghwI'mey completely, especially at the ends of words
• Trying to growl or roar when speaking, because they think that's what Klingon is
• Holding syllables too long
• Pronouncing unstressed syllables with a schwa vowel instead of the given vowel
• Shifting consonants across syllable boundaries
• Just giving up completely and making up syllables
  

Add to this list "Stressing the wrong syllables."

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name